


But Nothing is Better Sometimes

by MoreHuman



Series: It’s What We Deserve [2]
Category: Schitt's Creek, Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: 9 years, Angst and Humor, Crossover, F/M, Pre-Canon, Some Drug Stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21575869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoreHuman/pseuds/MoreHuman
Summary: “David Rose!” says a voice and oh great, because Trina’s brother Logan comes swanning through one of the doors. He swings it wide, using more wrist than necessary. Of course he doesn’t close it behind him, letting in a waft of chlorine and weed and this unbearable beep-boop music.
Relationships: David Rose/Loneliness, David Rose/Trina Echolls, Logan Echolls/Alexis Rose, Logan Echolls/Loneliness, Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: It’s What We Deserve [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1554928
Comments: 25
Kudos: 50
Collections: Broken Bestiary





	But Nothing is Better Sometimes

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for a canonical but unseen drug overdose. It still happens mostly offscreen here, so I feel the Teen rating fits.
> 
> ————
> 
> This is a prequel to “For All That We Are,” but you can read both parts in either order. (Or one or the other or neither, you’re the boss of you.)
> 
> I didn’t intend for this to become a series, but I got David and Logan talking and then they wouldn’t shut up so here we are.
> 
> Title is from (what else?) “when the party’s over” by Billie Eilish.
> 
>  **Update:** I added the Patrick/David and Logan/Veronica tags because I’m afraid no one will find this without them and I worked too hard to let that happen. Sorry if that feels like a bait and switch. In my defense, writing about the absence of these relationships felt like writing about these relationships, and the other fic in the series really connects those threads.

Ugh. This party sucks.

Conner Larkin’s kitchen cupboards are empty, this music is unacceptable, and there isn’t even a theme. There’s a salad bowl full of E out on the center island like it’s fucking _high school_ , but there’s no theme.

David isn’t even hungry, really, he’s just looking for something to do with his hands, ideally in a vacant room. And this room is eerily vacant, for a kitchen. And weirdly small, considering what Conner must be earning from all those vampire movies. And unsanitarily close to the pool, which David can see just beyond the wall of glass doors, all nude limbs draped in undulating blue.

It occurs to him that this might be the pool house kitchen.

“David Rose!” says a voice and oh great, because Trina’s brother Logan comes swanning through one of the doors. He swings it wide, using more wrist than necessary. Of course he doesn’t close it behind him, letting in a waft of chlorine and weed and this unbearable beep-boop music.

Maybe the theme is twerpy little brothers?

“Did you know the word ‘twerpy’ has re-entered my vocabulary since I met you?” And now David has just said the word “twerpy” out loud and this feels like a middle school party.

“Huh,” Logan says, and if he says something else David doesn’t hear it. Because Logan’s reaching into the bowl of pills, placing one on his tongue, and David almost gags because people have had their _hands_ in there and he would never. Except it’s possible he already has. When did he get to the pool house, again?

“–all alone? My sister dump you already?”

“I like being alone!” David says in a way that’s too loud, too insistent. A reflex. He tries to force a loose gesture out of his shoulders. His neck moves in a circle. Close enough. “I mean I… prefer it.”

“Huh,” Logan says again, eyes sparkling with withheld commentary.

“I’m shocked to see _you_ alone, though.” David rushes to get the words out before Logan’s commentary can become unwithheld. “Where’s that hot surfer dolt that’s always hanging around? The one with the sloppy mouth.” 

He cranes his neck out toward the pool and actually feels kind of hopeful. Logan’s friend really is nice to look at. On mute.

“Oh, Dick had to drive up to prison to see his dad.” David’s trying to figure out which of those words are euphemisms but Logan’s still talking. “I guess my mouth will have to be sloppy enough for the both of us tonight.”

David’s stomach turns, and maybe he’s about to find out whether he swallowed any of those pills. “Ew,” he says.

“Knock knock.” 

He’d turned away from the pool for one second, and suddenly Alexis is there in the doorway, saying “knock knock” and also actually knocking, but on the knob, not even on the glass where it will make noise. David can’t explain why this gesture horrifies him, but it does.

“What are we talking about?” she asks, slinking into the room and petting her ponytail down over one shoulder.

“Mouths.” Logan moves his own around gratuitously as he says it.

“Mmmm, I love mouths.”

Whatever’s happening right now, David refuses to witness it. “Alexis, what are you doing here?” 

If Alexis is here, then that means her fake friends are here, and the only fake friends David likes are his own. At least they pretend not to hate him. Alexis’s fake friends never pretend.

“Um, it’s a party?” She gives him her _shut up_ eyes, but he won’t.

“What happened to Bangkok?”

“Bangkok got lame.” She’s already whirling around as she says this, creating a conversation space with just her and Logan in it. David gets a whiff of honey and lavender as her hair floats past his face and is honestly kind of soothed despite himself. “Hi, I’m Alexis, David’s sister and skincare goals.”

“Please go drown in the pool,” David insists.

“David’s sister?” Logan’s eyebrows shoot up, looking ready to pounce. “You know, that’s funny, because David’s dating _my_ sister.”

“Oh, that is funny!” Alexis trills. “How you both have sisters. You’re funny.”

“And your timing is perfect,” Logan goes on, “because I actually came in here to have a little family chat with him.”

“Um,” says David, who doesn’t even like having chats with his own family.

“David.” Logan leans his palms forward onto the island between them, a somber shadow slanting across his face. David’s reminded of his mother’s preternatural ability to always find her light. “I feel like, as the man of the Echolls household, I need to ask you what your intentions are.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet!” Alexis coos, a lethal flash in her eyes. “Isn’t he a sweet brother, David?”

“Okay.” David’s face does a whole thing. “I’m feeling very trapped in an outdated gender dynamic right now, and I don’t consent to–”

“Hey, you should be glad it’s me asking, and not our dear old dad.” The shadow on Logan’s face no longer seems to have anything to do with the lighting. “He had this habit of trying to, you know, murder the people his kids were dating.”

“Okay,” David says again, but it’s very much not. Trina doesn’t talk about her dad—Trina doesn’t really talk about anyone except Trina—but he’d caught enough of that episode of _Tinseltown Diaries_ to know things are about to get very dark.

And then there’s _another_ fucking person in the doorway.

“Baby!” It’s Trina. “There you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

She grabs David by the shoulders and presses him into a kiss that feels kind of desperate and warm and lovely. Then it’s gone and he hopes no one can tell how much he wishes it would come back. The thing about Trina is that she’s actually a really good actress when she’s playing herself.

“Oh my god, Alexis!” Trina flings her arms around his sister’s neck next, and pretends not to notice the squirming response. “Babe, you didn’t tell me Alexis would be here tonight! How you doing, girlfriend?”

“I’m great, um…” Alexis and Trina have met exactly once. Her mouth contorts into many different shapes, one after the other, none of them resembling a name that starts with T. “Y-you.”

The other thing about Trina is that she’s impervious to embarrassment when she’s on a mission. 

“No cameras tonight?” she asks. “Taking a night off from being _A Little Bit Alexis_?”

“Oh no, they’re,” Alexis waves vaguely, “out there somewhere.”

This is a lie, but David can’t tell if she even knows it’s a lie. The “out there” Alexis just gestured toward isn’t full of background actors and flood lights and producers jittering into their fourteenth cups of coffee. Even parties like this one, where beautiful people do ugly things to escape from their beautiful lives, are too close to reality to be reality TV.

But it’s possible it all looks the same to Alexis.

“I’m just having too much fun in here, getting to know your brother.”

“Oh god, I hope he’s behaving himself.”

“Yes, can’t have me besmirching the good Echolls name.”

David can’t explain how this happened. All he wanted was to be alone, but instead people were drawn to him like moths to a flame, only somehow more disgusting. Except no, because Trina was drawn to Alexis and Alexis was drawn to Logan. The only one drawn to him was Logan, and that was just for asshole reasons.

“I’m going back up to the house,” David says.

There’s no one standing between him and the door, so he goes.

***

The beeps and boops in the living room are even worse than the ones outside, which didn’t seem possible. 

It takes David three laps of the house and two vodka tonics, but he finally finds someone interesting enough to talk to. Or rather, someone interesting enough to look at while she talks and he doesn’t listen. He can usually spot someone testing out a new look from a mile away, and this is a three-mile look, easy. She’s wearing green eyeshadow, a too-bold Egyptian eye, and a purple wig that’s so hideous, he can feel his mother getting hives just from _him_ being in its presence. Somehow, she’s almost pulling it off. He started tuning out her words right after “shooting my first music video,” but now she’s talking about waves, the ocean, and there’s an undertow of sadness in her voice he kind of hopes will swallow him whole.

Speaking of being swallowed whole, there’s a couple pressed up against the wall over her shoulder, really sucking face.

Sucking face? David can’t explain why his brain is insisting on this extremely juvenile description, but then he recognizes the fugly orange plaid shirt, and of course. Logan Echolls is a visual trigger that forces him to scrape words from the very bottom of his vocabulary barrel, apparently.

David can mostly only see his back and shoulders from here, a sliver of his jaw, but he has to admit it’s not a bad view. Even from this angle, he can tell Logan’s technique is impeccable. The expressive theatricality that makes him such an irritant to the world obviously has its uses. Those hands and that mouth that never stop performing are buried somewhere out of view and he’s throwing his entire body in after them, so that all David can see of the person he’s devouring is–

“ _Ew_ -uh!” he says, really milking that second syllable, because the arm snaking around Logan’s neck is wearing Alexis’s Tiffany cuff.

Before he’s even aware of moving, he’s thudding into the wall next to them. Hopefully he stepped around the tragic Egyptian eye girl instead of bowling her over or something.

“What’s going on here?” David closes his eyes as the two of them separate, and he should have plugged his ears too, because there’s a disgusting suction sound that he’ll never unhear. 

“Ew, David!” says Alexis, at the same time as Logan says, “Do you need me to draw you a diagram?”

David’s eyes snap back open, searing with too much revulsion to keep inside. “Alexis, can I talk to you a sec?”

She protests, probably, but her manicured raccoon gestures fade into his peripheral vision, because he’s just noticed that Logan’s eyes are brown. 

David’s always hated his own brown eyes, which most people assume is vanity and he lets them. The real reason is that he’s always found brown eyes the easiest, the most enjoyable to read, and he can’t stand the idea of giving himself away so freely. He’d kill for a steely gray or an icy blue to hide behind. Curse his father’s dominant genes. 

Logan’s eyes are a contrast to the rest of what he is. Everywhere else he’s all surface, mean lines and hard angles, but here it’s a long drop off the edge of him. It’s depth as defiance, a dare for anyone who cares to look to keep looking, to search him and see him down to his toes. David searches just enough to see that, even with some booze and whatever else in his system, Logan is heterosexual all the way down. What a waste.

“What a waste.” Fuck, he said that out loud. While staring into Logan’s eyes.

Logan’s eyes just stare back. “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

David forces himself to look away from this extremely straight person who was just sucking face with his sister and who loathes him. That’s too many bad choices, even for him.

“Fine, Alexis. I thought you’d want to see what Klair just said about you in this group text, but…”

“Oh my god, _what_?”

It does the trick. She pushes off the wall and stalks away from them, glaring into her phone like it’s betrayed her. Logan makes no effort to stop her, lets her go easily.

“You don’t deserve my sister,” David hisses as he spins around to follow her.

“Why not? You deserve mine,” Logan says to his back.

It takes Alexis longer than he expected to figure out his lie. By the time she stops short, they’re almost into the front hallway.

“David.” She looks up at him, her mouth a flat line. “There’s no group text.”

“Oh?” He twists his neck to frown down at her phone, like he could have _sworn_...

“Ugh, David! I was having fun!”

They both turn to look back at the spot where they’d left Logan, but he’s gone. There’s a new couple making out against the same patch of wall. Is there some sort of horniness magnet embedded behind the wallpaper there?

“Well, whatever. He invited me to this rave in Joshua Tree tomorrow night so… to be continued.” 

Alexis shares this bit of news with her phone, not with him, but she’s pressing buttons on both of them.

“Okay, no.” The emphatic hand gesture that explodes out of him with these words is wasted, because she’s still not looking at him. “I forbid you to go into the desert with Logan.”

“Mmm?” Her eyebrows draw together without creasing her forehead and he hates himself. “Who’s Logan?”

“Oh my god,” he says. Not that he hasn’t had entire nights with people whose names he never learned, but her inability to follow context clues is appalling. “The guy you just had an open-air seven minutes in heaven with over there?”

“Oh. Him.” She does look up then, biting her lip with a faraway longing in her eyes, as if this is some distant memory that’s already closer to her than David will ever be. “What about him?”

“He’s–” If he says “twerpy” again he’s going to kill himself. “He’s not nice.” 

“Mmm,” she says softly, biting her lip harder. David scrambles for something else.

“He’s Trina’s brother. He…” For the second time tonight, he’s thinking of _Tinseltown Diaries_ , and _ugh_ , this party sucks. “I think he got away with murder or something?”

Alexis rolls her eyes. “Whatever, like you’ve never had the hots for a murderer before.”

“Toni was my _pen pal_.” And he’s about to remind her that the charge was manslaughter, not murder, but then he remembers something else. “Trina said he has some kind of mob hit out on him.”

“Oh my god, David, it’s fine.” She flips her ponytail over her shoulder, more carefree in a single gesture than he’s felt in his entire life. “I’ve been with guys who were wanted by, like, three or four different mobs. It’s not a big deal.”

“I like you better when you’re on the other side of the world.” 

It’s one of those things he says to be mean, but then realizes is also true. When she’s gone all he does is worry about making sure she’s safe. When she’s here all he does is fail at it.

“Yeah, well, me too.”

There’s a twisted mess of something caught in his throat, and he squeezes it, forces it to form words. It forms exactly one word. 

“Okay,” David says.

“Okay,” Alexis says back. She walks off without saying goodbye.

***

The tonic’s run out, and David loses count of how many laps it takes him to down three vodka rocks. Then he can’t find any ice and he’s just drinking vodka. 

He really is hungry now, but the kitchen has too many people in it. Not that he’s above foraging in front of strangers, but verifying their strangeness would risk eye contact and anyway he can never be sure who will recognize him. Alexis’s fake friends are here somewhere. It’s safer to stay hungry.

Instead he finds himself crouched in a corner of the games room, pulling boxes of Chinese Checkers and Jenga and Yahtzee from the cabinets and sorting them into _correct_ and _incorrect_ piles on the floor like he’s planning a trip to Goodwill. There’s a soundtrack of clacking pool balls in the air that almost covers the beep-boops, and this music is officially so bad that David would rather listen to _sports_. Is pool a sport? Ping pong is a sport, Forrest Gump played it in the Olympics, and maybe there are ping pong noises happening, too, he doesn’t care enough to find out.

Someone laughs, and it’s a sound David recognizes without even turning around but he does anyway. Trina’s laughing, leaning against the vintage pinball machine by the door. There’s some guy burrowed into her throat who very quickly decides he’d rather burrow into her mouth instead.

Maybe the theme of this party is David watching people make out from across the room?

Except he’s not across the room anymore, he’s got his palms pressed to the pinball glass, on either side of a blinking red light that says SHOOT AGAIN. He looks up and Trina’s ear is right there so he leans in.

“Um. What the fuck?”

She recoils sideways, away from both him and the mouth-burrower. David’s not quick enough closing his eyes while she does it and now he could probably identify this guy from a police lineup of tongues. Ick.

“Oh no, baby, this isn’t what it looks like,” Trina says, but it doesn’t sound like she wants him to believe it. She’s not even looking at him, swiveling her head around to peer through the open doors into the next room. He has a brain full of a belly full of vodka, but he barely has to wonder before he knows what she’s doing.

She’s looking for the cameras. The cameras Alexis promised her that definitely aren’t here. How the _fuck_ is David the only one who knows what a reality TV set looks like, when he’s the only one who never wants to be on one? 

But fine. If Trina wants a scene, he’ll give her a scene. He’s full of them.

“Who are you?” David demands of the mouth-burrower. He has him pegged as the type of walking muscle that doesn’t know how to function when a man in a bold floral print speaks to him forcefully. He’s not wrong.

“Trey,” blinks Trey.

“And what teenager do you play on the CW, Trey?”

“Um, I’m on this season of _The Bachelorette_ ,” says Trey, answering the spirit of David’s question, possibly brighter than he looks.

“Oh my god, this is why I never leave New York!” 

The sports noises, the clacking and ping-ponging, have stopped. The back of David’s neck prickles with the familiar dread of a roomful of eyes on him and he luxuriates in it, can’t wait to make a fool of himself. He turns on Trina again.

“If we’d stayed in New York like I wanted, you could be cheating on me with a _Law & Order _ day player, or an off-Broadway percussionist, or–” His mind spins, trying to recall if there are any male reality stars in New York, but all he can picture are Housewives. In New Jersey, maybe? But New Jersey is even worse than Southern California. “Anyway, you know, someone with class.”

“I’m not cheating on you, babe,” Trina says. He expects her to launch into a definition of “cheat,” point out how it presupposes conversations about labels and exclusivity that they’ve never had. But no, that’s the other white meat of drama and Trina only eats red. “I just thought maybe you’d be into this. Into him. You know, because you’re–”

He can’t hear how that sentence ends, so he kisses her, rough and hard until he remembers that’s what she likes. Then he kisses Trey, laying into his tongue like it knows what it did. If anyone in this room is going to use David’s sexuality as a spectacle, it’ll be him.

“Is that what you want?” he yells, and before either of them can answer, he whirls around and shuts himself behind the first door he sees.

It’s dark, and at first he thinks he’s stepped into a closet. Which, since he’s just kissed a man in front of who knows how many cellphone cameras, seems like the universe having a laugh. But then his eyes adjust and he sees it’s actually a bigger room than he thought, dimly lit instead of pitch black. There’s a pedestal sink and a standup shower and a Zen water feature built into one wall, aromatherapy in the air. It’s some kind of combination bathroom/meditation chamber, which is a revolting concept that is for some reason already making him feel calmer.

That is, until he hears a groan and spots the streak of orange plaid arched over the toilet.

“Oh my god, there are literally _two people_ in your entire family, why can’t I escape it for five minutes?!”

But Logan’s too far gone to respond, if he’s even heard him at all. His head is fully in the toilet bowl, though he hasn’t thrown up (David has a nose for these things, aromatherapy or no), and he’s chanting something incomprehensible into the echo of it.

“Um. Logan?”

Logan surfaces, resting one cheek on the seat, his eyes closed. When he speaks, it’s clear and practiced, to no one in particular.

“Veronica Mars loved me once.”

“I don’t know what that means,” David says, but he kind of does. He knows what it means to wind yourself so tightly around your disappeared happiness that it breaks you. It’s why he prefers to never be happy. Happiness is overrated.

Logan goes slack, passes out and he still hasn’t thrown up. That’s a problem, but the much bigger problem is that David needs to get out of here, and the only way out is through the room of people who watched him come in. They’ll all be looking at him, so he needs to give them something to look at. He’ll give them Logan.

“Trina!” he screeches, throwing the door wide so it bangs against the wall. “Your brother’s a disaster, come get him.”

David’s feet stay focused on their task— _out, through_ —but his eyes scan the room even as it whizzes by. Trina’s not here. He was out of the room for ninety seconds, and she’s long gone already, and he doesn’t know how he expected anything else. His presence can’t hold her attention, why would his absence?

“He’s barely breathing!” shouts a panicked voice at the door to the bathroom, but that’s not Trina either. It’s the girl with the Halloween store wig and the new singing career her daddy probably paid for. “Can we call an ambulance? Can we _please_ call an ambulance?”

“And that’s my cue,” David says to no one, wanting out of this party, out of Neptune, out of SoCal. Just out. He alters course toward the front door.

Alexis is standing between here and there, talking to some people he can’t bear to look at long enough to recognize. He tugs her elbow as he passes by, saying, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” An ambulance means cops, and he can’t be sure her usual cocktail of flirtation and bribery will work on the local force.

“No,” she says without turning around. It’s not “No, David,” or “No” with a hair flip smelling of honey and lavender. He doesn’t even get an “Ew.” She just hugs her elbow back into herself and doesn’t drop the thread of her conversation. “Well, I tried to tell Solange that Hayden was no Kirsten, but…”

When David steps out into the night air, he’s alone.

Just like he wanted.


End file.
